16) Kobe Kogyo, the First to Start Production of Transistors
Point contact transistor unveiled by Kobe Kogyo
The name of the company who first manufactured and sold transistors
to outside of the company in Japan is Kobe Kogyo who was acquired by Fujitsu
later.
Kobe Kogyo held a reception in January, 1954 at Ueno Seiyoken in Tokyo, where
they showed a prototype of a radio to public which used point-contact transistors
made by themselves. They launched the transistors into market in February,
right after the reception event. The price was as high as 3000~4000 yen per
piece, which was then equivalent to average managing director's monthly salary.
Tetsuya Arizumi who was Senior Manager of vacuum tube department in the company
at that time, took a lead of the development of transistor in Kobe Kogyo.
He thought, "It looks interesting," and started the work as his
private project, not notifying the company. He visited US in 1951 which was
the year of San Francisco Peace Treaty, and he inspected the sites of transistor
manufacturing by himself at Bell Telephone Laboratories and at RCA Laboratory
as well. He took and sent memos with sketches about manufacturing process
and equipment to his team in Japan. Leo Esaki who won Nobel Prize later was
a member of his team, fresh out of school.
Arizumi wrote an article to celebrate Esaki’s winning of Nobel Prize for a
Japanese electronics magazine ‘Desnhi Zairyo’, of which I was a chief editor.
He wrote with an attached photo, "The photograph is the first PNP transistor
made in Japan in the spring to summer of 1953 which I believe you would remember
nostalgically" and "The lead wire is quite thick and long, and the
total structure obviously lacks in consideration for good thermal design."
His team was one step ahead in the development of PNP junction type transistor
as well. Later, Arizumi became a professor of Nagoya University and contributed
to the development in solid state device research in Japan.
(By courtesy of Tetsuya Arizumi)